5 Easy Ways to Increase your Ecommerce Cart Value

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Average Order Value (AOV) is the sum of revenue generated divided by the number of orders taken – it is interchangeable with the term Average Cart Value. Sure, AOV immediately sounds important because it describes the cash flow of your business but your AOV measures more than that. For retailers, average order value is a performance indicator and key marketing metric; it indicates how well your website engages customers during the browsing and check out process. The purpose of increasing your average cart value is to generate larger purchases for the same amount of traffic.

Here are 5 easy ways to boost your average cart value that are native and available for free in your PrestaShop software:

1. Free Shipping Thresholds

Change the behavior of your customers by changing the way they think when they are shopping on your site. By offering customers free shipping for orders over a certain amount, you have turned on that little voice inside their head pressuring them to meet your threshold. If your average cart value is $45 and shipping costs you $5, set your free delivery threshold at $60. Often customers won’t meet exactly $60 and consequently spend more than where you set the bar.

This technique promotes products that are related and frequently purchased together encouraging customers to add more items to their cart. For example, a customer purchases a camera therefore you offer them a memory card, camera case and/or a tripod. These may be items that the customer never even considered purchasing but now that you are mentioning it, it makes sense to purchase them together.

This is one of the most common used practices by the biggest online retailers to increase cart value. You have the opportunity to cross sell items on the product page and during the checkout page. This technique helps incentivize customers to add more products to their cart by making suggestions such as “complete the look” or “you may also want to consider.” Try to avoid cluttering the page with recommendations since it can make the shopping experience feel less personal.

Upselling is when a customer decides to purchase a more expensive version of a product, add features, warranty or even gift wrapping. The intent is to clearly depict to customers why the upgraded version has more value. Many top retailers use pricing tables to clearly display the differences between each “level” and “package.” Often retailers motivate customers to buy the most expensive item by giving it the highest visibility on the website. Also, one of the most common incentives is convincing customers that by buying the more expensive product they are saving more money in the long run.

Rewarding customers for purchasing more is a popular and enticing strategy. You can do this in a couple of ways:

Volume Pricing: This motivates customers to purchase the same or related product by offering them a discount for buying both items at the same time. For example, if a customer purchases a facial cream, you can recommend bundling it with a face scrub for 20% off the entire order. This concept also works when you offer customers deals such as buy two get the third free. With this tactic you are convincing your customer to purchase more of an item they were already intending on purchasing by creating value in buying them together.

Discount Threshold: This is similar to the free shipping approach except the incentive is a discount applied at check out or at the time of the next purchase. You can set a threshold of $100 so that for every $100 spent, customers get 15% off their order.

These are some of the most effective and easy tactics to increase your average cart value. All of these strategies are native features in the PrestaShop software so they are free and ready to use! Download PrestaShop today!

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